To The Heaviside Layer
by Arixa23
Summary: The events from Memory to the end of the musical and beyond, as seen from Asparagus' viewpoint. With a little reincarnation tossed in at the end. Oneshot, implied Asparagus/Grizabella, Asparagus/Jellylorum, and Skimbleshanks/Jennyanydots.


To The Heaviside Layer 

"_Now Old Deuteronomy, just before dawn, through a silence you feel you could cut with a knife, announces the cat who will now be reborn and come back to a different Jellicle life..."_

It's her. She's back again. She had to come back again. I can deal with Macavity. I've dealt with lots of things. But I can't deal with her.

She sings. I can't look at her. I bury my face in my leader's fur and hope that they'll put it down to something else- nobody else is looking at her either. But they're not looking because they don't want to look at her. I'm not looking because I desperately, horribly want to look. And if I did that, everything would fall apart.

If I looked at her, I would break. My control would break. I would break. Years, _years_ of rejecting her, along with the other cats. She learned to forget me. I can see it in her eyes when she looks at me, me scorning her. I stopped thinking about her. But I never forgot her. She is Grizabella the outcast now, but I remember when she was Grizabella the Glamour Cat. Before she was the Glamour Cat, even. When she was just Bella.

I'm a grown tom! I've been a grown tom since some of the cats here were kittens. I don't cry over long-ago queens. This is how cats are supposed to live– happiness one moment, heartbreaking sadness the next. And we're supposed to not care. We're supposed to be self-absorbed and aloof, flippant, silly and dignified all in one. But we're never supposed to be sad. We're never supposed to cry.

I could never live like that. Maybe it's because of the acting. When you want to act sad, in the theater, really honestly audience-sobbing sad, first you have to learn what sadness really is. And once you've learned that, you can never just shake sadness away again. Maybe I'm unnatural. Maybe I've been _humanized. _Working with humans, all your life, learning their emotions, does that to you. Maybe I'm just more caring than any of them.

She stops singing. She stops singing. Why did she stop singing? I turn around, slowly. She lies on the ground. My heart almost stops. I don't even know why. Is she dead? Is that it, she'll stop coming back, no more fresh heartache, just old, old regrets about what could have been, playing back a million times, forever? Was this my last chance, is it over?

And then a clear, high voice cuts through the silence. _"Sunlight through the trees in summer, endless masquerading..."_ Jemima, Jemima singing. Someone is singing to Bella. Only a kitten, but weren't we all only kittens once? Hope explodes inside me like a dozen of Mistoffelees' fireworks going off. I think if I am disappointed now, I will die myself.

Grizabella raises herself. Sings with Jemima. She's not dead. She's alive and she sings. The only beautiful thing about her that has survived is her voice. That is as beautiful as it ever was. Better, maybe. She's had to practice it, in the absence of her physical beauty. Or in what we all saw as the absence.

And she struggles to her feet. Inhales, as if she's about to scream. She does, but when she shouts, she sings. And what she sings makes another bundle of fireworks go off in my chest.

_ "TOUCH ME!" _ she sings. 'Touch me'. We never touch her, except to shove her and mock her. But I, and I think every cat here, know what she means.

_"It's so easy to leave me all alone with the memories of my days in the sun. If you touch me..."_ she pauses, and my throat constricts so much I can hardly breathe. In the junkyard, all emotions are intensified tenfold. _"You'll understand what happiness is." _And she looks around, at the cats watching her, all the cats now, every cat, watching her, and she smiles, just slightly. _"Look... a new day has begun."_

And then she does the unbelievable. She turns around and she starts, in that hobbling walk of hers which faintly echoes the way she used to saunter in the old days, to walk away. And Victoria– lovely Victoria– rises, and glides after her. And nobody, not Jellylorum, not Jennyanydots, not Munkustrap, not Old Deuteronomy, stops her.

As she comes up to Grizabella, she pauses, and she looks in our direction. If she is disobeying Deuteronomy, then not only Grizabella but she will be an outcast. But Old Deuteronomy nods to her. And the fireworks are not going off in my chest now, but behind my eyes, dancing, and I hold my breath now, like a human watching its baby take its first steps. And Victoria glides, in that supernaturally graceful walk she has, up to the Glamour Cat, and puts her white hand in the gray, grizzled one.

And now they all rise to meet her. Mistoffelees, Alonzo, Skimbleshanks, all go to her, touch her. And, I realize, I must too.

At last..._ They've accepted me. Years of rejection, and this is the fulfillment. They're honoring _me_ now._

_ Music is playing in my head, or maybe outside it. I look around to see where it's coming from, and then back._

I remember him._ Back, a long way back, when I was part of the tribe... there was something. I don't remember it. But I remember him. Younger then, of course, and gray like me. He still has the same smile._

_ We take hands, and our eyes lock. I'm falling into his beautiful green gaze... _This is what could have been._ He's thinking the same thing. I can tell. _Remember me? Yes.

_ It's over in a millisecond, a million years. I move on to the next cat - I must, I know. I know everything now. The Heaviside Layer has come down here for the moment, and even if nothing is ever the same again, this will still have been worth everything._

And then she rises. Up on the tire, up with Old Deuteronomy. My eyes go blurry. I'm not sure it's tears. It might be the lights, supernatural, midnight-cat lights, like starlight if starlight were almost a spotlight, or it might be the magic in the air, so thick you can feel it, cut it with a knife. I sing and I wave with the rest of them. I should be happy for her. I suppose. I honestly don't know at this point. When she is halfway up, I know I should stop reaching for her, waving like an idiot, higher than anyone else, but I can't stop now. I can't break this contact, the last one ever.

When the Everlasting Cat's paw comes down– or, Deuteronomy says, it can't actually be the Everlasting Cat's paw, it's a projection of the Everlasting Cat's paw onto this dimension, this junkyard– she looks purely, radiantly happy. Perhaps I don't matter to her the way she does to me, now. Maybe it's egoistic to think she should think of me at all right now, when she is about to be part of the Heaviside Layer. She's looking at Old Deuteronomy now, anyway, not me. And then she steps onto the paw, and lifts up, up, climbing herself as the Everlasting Cat takes her. And just before she lifts out of sight, she looks back down, at Deuteronomy, and then her gaze sweeps, just for a second, to me.

And then she's gone.

And just like that, the attention shifts. We must finish the Ball, Deuteronomy must sing the Ad-Dressing of Cats before the sun rises. The letdown hits me now, hard. I bite my lip. And then I control myself. I'm an actor. I'm _good _at hiding my emotions. I slip on my contented face, and watch our leader. Maybe someone watching me closely could tell that I'm not all right, but they're listening to Deuteronomy, not me. My breath is the one thing might give me away, deep, jagged breaths, like crying, but I keep it silent. Not now. Not here, not now. Wait until the sun rises.

_"A cat's entitled to expect these evidences of respect, so this is this and that is that, and that's..."_ deep breath, _"how you address a caaaaaaatttttttt!" _Everlasting Cat, I'm out of breath. Am I really getting old? Or is it just the circumstances, what's happened tonight? I have no idea. Anyway, it's over.

The cats disperse, going their separate ways, back to their humans or to spend more time with their friends in hidden nooks in the junkyard. And I? In the almost-light before dawn, I slide into the old, and, I notice, slightly rusting piece of piping, and I lie there, staring at the circle of outside I can see. I want to look at the stars, imagine Bella up there in the Heaviside Layer, but the stars are gone now, fading in the light. So I close my eyes, and it's then that I realize that I am crying, tears wetting my fur, soaking my face. I don't try to stop myself. I curl up in that pipe, hugging my knees, weeping silently about everything that could have been and never was.

A voice reaches me after a while, calling from the outside, worming its way into my circle of perception. "Gus! Gus!"

It's Jellylorum. Jellylorum the biter, Jellylorum the scratcher, Jellylorum the hater, Jellylorum who always abused her, coming looking for me. What does she want? What _could_ she want, now, after the Ball?

"Gus!"

"No," I say. "I'm not Gus yet. I'm Asparagus." Don't put me away in the darkness with that, like they did to her, don't turn me into my father, mocked at by the younger cats behind my back. It's Asparagus. Asparagus.

Jellylorum looks into my pipe, her eyes grabbing me. "G - Asparagus, the Gumbie Cat is -"

"You never liked her," my mouth says, by itself. It has to come out now, or when will I ever talk to her about it? "Even when she was part of the tribe, you never liked her. You and Jennyanydots always hissed at her when she wasn't looking. What did you have against her? Why were you so jealous? She was just a cat, were you afraid of her because she was more confident than you were? _Why did you hate her so much?_"

Jellylorum blinks at me. "Asparagus, what are you talking about? Jennyanydots is having kittens!"

I blink back at her, my train of thought completely derailed. "What? I know that."

"No, I mean she's having them _now!_"

I sit up so fast I hit my head on the wall of the pipe. "_What?_ I _told_ her she shouldn't be exercising so much tonight!"

The derailed train is lifted up by an Everlasting Cat paw and shoved down a different track. The thoughts which flash through my head as I race after Jellylorum are something else entirely. _Where is it written down that the enemy of my friend has to be my enemy? Life goes on, Asparagus, life goes on._

By the time we get to the open trunk of the car where Jennyanydots is lying, being anxiously hovered over by Skimbleshanks, it's all over. Jenny smiles weakly when she sees me, unaware of all my previous mental turmoil, and gestures to the four kittens next to her, little wet blind things snuggling and snuffling next to their mother. Two are orange tabbies, like Skimble; one calico, like Jenny; and one mottled grey, like me. Or like...

Something goes _click_ inside my head. Who's to say that causality is linear? Or that time passes in the Heaviside Layer the same way it does here?

Skimbleshanks is glaring at me slightly. I wave my hands at him: "I never did anything with her, Skimble, I swear!" But Jennyanydots smiles again. "Skimble's just being possessive, Gus, don't pay any attention to him. She looks just like you, doesn't she?" She picks the little queen kitten up, hands her to me. "Well, sort of," I say.

"I thought I'd let you name her," she says to me.

I hold the kitten close, nuzzling her a little. Everyone deserves a second chance to be loved, don't they? And what more fitting place to grow up than in this tom and queen's loving household? I smile at Jenny, and nod.

"I think," I say, "we'll call her Bella."


End file.
